(P13-019-23) The Effect of Phytoestrogens on Women-Related Cancers Using the Automatic Method To Classify and Review Literature

Objectives: Epidemiological studies show that breast, endometrial, and ovarian are malignant tumors with a high incidence, and mortality in women is increasing nowadays. These cancers’ development is closely related to estrogen status. Phytoestrogens have similar structures with human estradiol, thus, might exert similar effects and interfere with the action of estrogen in our physiology. However, there are still conflicting results between phytoestrogens and women's cancer risk. The aim is to develop effective, accurate, and optimized ways through computational technologies to explore the relationship between phytoestrogens and women-related cancers.

Methods: A natural language processing system was used to establish an automated classification program to help with data classification and reduce the time and effort of manual reading. A database was built for this study containing four classification categories of phytoestrogens, cancers, experiments, and research results. There are three types of cancer (breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers); six kinds of phytoestrogens (coumestrol, daidzein, equol, genistein, lignin, and resveratrol); three research types (cell, animal, and human studies). The text mining methods were used to explore the correlation between phytoestrogens and women-related cancer development.

Results: It was demonstrated that lignin and resveratrol have higher positive effects on women-related cancers, while daidzein and equol tended to have negative effects. In cancer types, coumestrol, genistein, daidzein, or equol increased the risk of breast cancer. However, phytoestrogens decreased the risk of ovarian cancer and increased the risk of endometrial cancer. In experiment types, the effects from cell and animal experiments showed higher negative impacts but exerted a neutral impact in human studies, especially in breast cancer.

Conclusions: Based on the data, phytoestrogens lignin and resveratrol might benefit patients with women-related cancers. However, daidzein and equol might slightly increase the risk of endometrial or breast cancer. Therefore, patients with women’s cancers should cautiously consider taking phytoestrogens depending on the cancer type and the specific phytoestrogen.

Funding Sources: This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan.